Iconography

Iconography

In your average zombie film you tend to have many themes that appear throughout different films, themes that tell you this is a zombie film. These themes are often similar throughout all zombie films so can get repetitive but they are necessary to tell the audience what the film is and what it’s about.

Blood is one of the main iconography in zombie films as it is so important to have the blood and to represent it in a way that lets you know it is a zombie film so that usually blood from the face or jaw if it’s the zombie you’re portraying as it shows that the human is in fact a zombie and is eating other humans. As well, Blood could also be portrayed in the body of a survivor to show what they have been through. The blood often represents the change and the actual problems of the zombie world as blood is usually a bad sign as usually when you bleed you’ve hurt yourself and the blood shows the problems in the zombie world and that the world is “hurt”.

Blood portrayed on a Zombie

Blood portrayed on a human

Other iconography in zombie films is torn clothes and torn skin.  This is because it’s a ruined world therefore you portray this through ruined clothes. Also they go through a lot and often have to fight their way through different situations therefore the torn clothes is normal in any fighting situation. On the zombies they usually have no sense of direction or knowledge, they only care about one thing and that is food. So they will do anything to get to food (usually the humans) and don’t care about ripping their clothes or their skin.

Torn skin on a zombies

Also One of the main iconography in zombie films is the Apocalypse idea which supports the fact of a ruined city or town with broken doors, dirty houses, smashed windows, burnt out homes and ruins. In most zombie films you have many shots of the scene and the rubble around it an example of this is in The Walking Dead the first scene the hospital is completely ruined and has been 'Overrun' by the zombies meaning that they've taken over the whole building and the building is now ruined and broken to give the effect of a broken world. 28 Days later also does this kind of scene with one character waking round seeing the broken world.

To conclude, in order to make people know our film is a zombie film we will have to use lots of fake blood in the face and clothes to show and portray the fact that they are zombies, we will also use make up to create the zombies. Also we will use clothes that are ragged and ripped to give a more apocalypse feel to the film. However due to the fact that we may be filming in the college and we don't have any money to spend on broken homes and ruined cities so we will have to try our best to make our set look as rough as possible. But thanks to the iconography we can distinguish our film from others.